What is wrong with White Anglosaxon Christians?
What do serial killers Ted Bundy, John Wayne Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, Gary Ridgway, Dean Corll and Wayne Williams have in common? They are white Anglosaxon Christians.
What do mass shooters Stephen Paddock (Las Vegas, 2017), Adam Lanza (Newtown, 2012), Devin Kelley (Sutherland Springs, 2017), George Hennard (Killeen, 1991), James Huberty (San Ysidro, 1984), Charles Whitman (Austin, 1966) and Patrick Sherill (Edmond, 1986) have in common?
They are white Anglosaxon Christians.
It is difficult to find a black, a Hispanic or an immigrant in these lists.
("Mass shooting" and "serial killer" here refers to more than 9 homicides. The higher the threshold you choose, the more likely that they are mostly white Christians with an Anglosaxon last name. The lower the threshold, the more likely that there are also other groups).
These are routinely classified as cases of "mental illness" but why is it that mental illness seems to affect mainly white Anglosaxon Christians born in the USA?
Note that articles on these mass shootings often omit the name of the shooter (they normally only mention the place and date), whereas any article on an Islamic terrorist attack would include the names of the attackers (to emphasize their religion and origin).
What was Timothy McVeigh, the author of the biggest terrorist attack in the USA carried out by a citizen (Oklahoma City, 1995)? A white Anglosaxon Christian.
What about the soldiers who committed atrocities in Vietnam, like William Calley (My Lai massacre, 1968), and Iraq, like the five who gang-raped a little Iraqi girl and then murdered her and her entire family (Mahmudiyah massacre, 2006)?
White Christians.
What do televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, evangelical minister Ted Haggard, Republican senator Larry Craig and Republican senator David Vitter, all of them involved in prostitution or sex molestation scandals? They are white Anglosaxon Christians. And so is Republican politician Roy Moore, accused in 2017 of molesting underage girls, and so is Jim Zeigler, the state auditor of Alabama, who just justified Moore's behavior by noting that the Virgin Mary was a teenager when approached by Joseph the adult carpenter (thus revealing that the story of Jesus can be used as propaganda for child molestation).
White evangelicals have become a particularly dangerous bunch, as they consistently vote for the most evil crook in the race.

Given that it is proven beyond any reasonable doubt that white Anglosaxon Christians born in the USA are more likely to become serial killers and mass shooters and sex perverts, should we expel all US-born white Anglosaxon Christians from the USA, and, in fact, from any other country of the world?
Why are we banning Iranian, Somali and Yemeni citizens from the USA (no Iranian, Somali or Yemeni has ever killed more than 2 people in the USA) but not white Anglosaxon Christians?

(september 2017)
Who invented fake news (or: A brief history of the Left in the West).
Trump will be remembered as the president of "fake news", the president who
used fake news (spread by radical right-wing media and by Russia) to win votes,
and also who was gullible enough to believe so many fake news himself.
But Trump did not start it, nor did the radical right-wing start it.
The praxis of fabricating fake news to discredit the other side was largely
a leftist invention.
During the 1960s many leftists embraced "alternative" science, spiritualism
and even magic, and looked down on science and reason as conspiracies used
by the state to control the people.
Leftists distrusted everything, to the point of inventing conspiracy theories
about the assassination of president John Kennedy (starting with
Mark Lane's book "Rush to Judgment" in 1966)
and about the Moon landing (starting with
Bill Kaysing's book "We Never Went to the Moon" in 1976 and peaking with Peter Hyams' film "Capricorn One" in 1978).
Believing in UFOs was deemed perfectly reasonable, whereas believing in
medicine was deemed naive if not dangerous.
Erich von Daniken's book "Chariots of the Gods" (1968) launched an entire new
genre of nonfiction, devoted to proving that aliens had built the ancient
monuments of Egypt, England and the Easter Islands. The first books to advance
this thesis were actually published in France before the boom of spirituality:
Louis Pauwels' and Jacques Bergier's "The Morning of the Magicians" (1960)
and
Robert Charroux's "One Hundred Thousand Years of Man's Unknown History" (1963),
and therefore had gone mostly ignored.
Theodore Roszak's book "The Making of a Counter Culture" (1969), the book that coined the term "counterculture", warned the readers against "reason" and "reality", science being just a trap invented by the Establishment, and scholars being simply state bureaucrats out to catch you in that trap.
The boom of anti-rationalism extended from the 1960s into the 1980s of the
new-age movement. Millions of what are now labeled "liberals" rejected science
as nonsense while accepting uncritically the most outrageous fantasies by Indian gurus.
Another book that popularized the counterculture was
Charles Reich's "The Greening of America" (1970), that wed paeans to
magical thinking with rants against the antidemocratic conspiracies of the "corporate state".
Peter Tompkins' and Christopher Bird's book "The Secret Life of Plants" (1973)
claimed that the corporate state (and its scientific apparatus) had suppressed the truth about plants being sentient beings.
Michel Foucault, a French philosopher much admired in leftist Berkeley, accused the
state of oppressing its citizens with a "regime of truth".
A Berkeley philosopher, Paul Feyerabend, derided science as superstition in his
book "Against Method" (1975).
Citizens of the USA started believing in all sorts of conspiracy theories:
aliens were kidnapping people and Elvis Presley was alive.
Surprisingly, they even started believing the propaganda coming from the
Soviet Union, the country where the official newspaper was titled "The Truth"
("Pravda" in Russian). The Soviet Union excelled in the art of twisting the
facts with elaborate innuendos to prove the exact opposite of what happened.
This is really when post-truth and post-fact blossomed.
There were no social media, and few TV channels, but word of mouth spread
the conspiracy theories about the "seven sisters" of the oil business and
the "Illuminati" who control the whole world.
Then came the conspiracy theories about the war in Kosovo (there was supposed
to be a lot of oil in Kosovo) and about the children killed by the sanctions
against Iraq (the population of Iraq should have been decimated).
Leftists also rewrote the history of World War II (the USA provoked the
Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and did nothing to stop it) and of Al Qaeda
(George W Bush and/or Israel staged the 2001 terrorist attacks, not Osama
bin Laden).
Michael Moore's documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11" (2004) was a typical specimen of
leftist "fake news".
The vast majority of these "post-truths" were invented and spread by the Left.
In 1996 two major sources of "post-truths" were started, although in different
parts of the world and with wildly different agendas:
Al Jazeera in the Middle East and Fox News in the USA.
They both grew their audience very rapidly and within ten years they became
dominant forces of public opinion.
Al Jazeera proceeded to present all the problems of the Islamic world as
caused by Israel and the CIA. If a ferry capsizes, it must be the Israeli
secret agents who did it. If a plane crashes, it must be a CIA bomb.
When the USA started the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq, it wildly
underestimated the power of Al Jazeera's post-truths. Al Jazeera was the
main creator of fake news about the 2001 terrorist attacks and in 2003
galvanized the Islamic world with the idea that the USA was invading Iraq
to steal its oil.
Fox News used the same strategy for right-wing propaganda.
Of course, Hitler and Mussolini had been the
masters of right-wing post-truths, but the Right had lost that habit until
Fox News started following in their footsteps and scaling up
the propaganda. Fox News, just like Al Jazeera, would devote an entire
day to debates about facts that didn't exist or that were wildly exaggerated:
Bill and Hillary Clinton assassinated White House attorney Vince Foster,
vaccines cause autism, and the first
black president, Barack Obama, was not born in the USA.
That's when "fake news" became a specialty of the Right.
Trump or someone in his team understood the exponential increase in the power of fake news due to social media.
In January 2017 alone: Fox News invented the fact that the killer of six people in a Canadian mosque was a Moroccan immigrant when in fact it was a very white Christian fan of Trump, and, lo and behold, a devout viewer of Fox News, where he probably got the inspiration to kill Muslims; and Trump's spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway went on television to talk about a Bowling Green Massacre that never took place, but that certainly inspires more Fox News viewers to hate Muslims.
What caused the transition of fake news from the Left to the Right?
I think quite simply the shift in the balance of power. The Left was
a minority for most of the Cold War. Even during the peak of the antiwar
protests of the 1960s, the left of the Democratic Party never had any
real power. Even in countries like Italy
that had strong communist parties, the Left rarely managed to govern.
After the end of the Cold War the Left slowly came to represent a powerful
combination of social issues (pro-women, pro-gay, environmental,
etc) and anti-Establishment issues (against income inequality and the
political influence of corporations) that appealed to young voters.
Slowly but steadily the Left became the majority, and didn't need "post-truths"
as much as before. The Right, on the other hand, started needing them.
By coincidence, that's when social media were booming. The World-wide Web
was invented in 1991. Google, Facebook and Twitter boomed just about at the
time when Fox News was growing. It was natural for the Right to jump from
television to the Web. The Web lends itself to post-truths and fake news
because information on the Web mostly comes from an anonymous mob.
The Web's most famous source of dis-information, Wikipedia, launched in 2001
(see Wikipedia as a Force for Evil).
Anybody can edit a Wikipedia article, which is precisely what post-truth is:
anybody can create her or his own truth and publish it to the world.
(The Wikipedia article on me has always been full of mistakes and biases).
There was a general mood towards "alternative" realities.
The conspiracy theories of the Right came out at the right time to ride the
new social media on the Web.
In fact, Trump's campaign used Twitter and Facebook as the preferred platforms
for their fake news, with radical right-wing television as a secondary (not
primary) vehicle.
But their tactics in fabricating those fake news were exactly like the ones
originally used by liberals to slam conservatives.
If you think that California, and in particular the Bay Area, and in particular
Silicon Valley, are hubs of liberal ideology, then you can add another piece
of responsibility to the Left.
Silicon Valley created Trump. Trump's campaign used Facebook to spread fake
news. Facebook is perfect medium for spreading inflamatory articles.
Facebook makes money out of popular threads and inflamatory articles generate
precisely the kind of threads that become popular.
Trump used Twitter to judge and insult. Twitter is the perfect platform for
defaming others and fabricating conspiracy theories: it limits the discussion
to 140 characters, i.e. it serves the kind of propaganda that relies on
short attention span (on believing the source without doing due diligence).
Twitter too makes money out of tweets that generate controversy.
Both Facebook and Twitter were more active in spreading fake news than they
would like to admit: they made tons of money out of Trump's fake news.
They are amplifiers of conspiracy theories because their revenues go up
proportionally to how popular those conspiracy theories become.
Silicon Valley invented the perfect platforms for spreading fake news.
In fact, the protesters who marched in the streets against Trump's election
were almost as scary as the man they protested against.
It is easier to
march three hours in the street than to read a professional article for
30 minutes, therefore most of them are as uninformed as the consumers of
fake news.
Technology has atrophied brains to the point that people refuse to read more
than 140 characters.
Therefore they march in the street, but without the conviction that would
come from reading a lengthy article (or, god forbid, a whole book).

(june 2017)
Hillary Clinton, loser
Quote: "I take responsibility for every decision I made... but that's not why I lost".
Hillary Clinton just doesn't get it. She keeps blaming everybody except herself
for not becoming president in 2017 even though she won the elections by three
million votes.
She has accused the FBI, Russia, the New York Times and the Democratic National Committee. I am sure that sooner or later she will also accuse Obama.
They are all guilty of conspiring against her. That's the only way that she
can rationalize the fact that she, the perfect candidate, did not get the
White House.
Sure, the scandal about her private email server was simply ludicrous: there
was nothing to it, just Fox News propaganda. But she never took it seriously
and therefore let Fox News run with it ad infinitum (Fox News stopped talking
about it exactly the moment that she was defeated). Worse: she consistently
tried to hide and obstruct, therefore worsening her public image and lending
credibility to the Fox News propaganda.
This would be ok if she had been the inspirational candidate of her generation.
But she was such an uninspiring candidate that, towards the end, she was basically
counting on people voting against Trump, not for her. In other words, she
figured that voters had no choice but to vote for her, as if this was something
to be proud of.
She totally ignored the blue-collar workers of the "rust belt", and never visited once Wisconsin during the same period when she was giving highly-paid talks
to big financial corporations, showing whom she cares for.

She stubbornly stood by transgender bathrooms and the Obamacare mandate,
the only things that we can remember of her program (because they really
annoyed the majority of people).
She even flip-flopped on the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
which many of us considered the main achievements of the Obama presidency.

Hillary Clinton proudly mentions that she won 3 million votes more than her
Russian-sponsored opponent "Vladimir" Trump
(see Where we stand with the Trump-Russia investigation).
She is so full of herself that she doesn't
realize what that means: it means that she lost because she and her colleagues
in the Senate
never did anything to change the ridiculous obsolete undemocratic way
in which the USA elects presidents. If she had spent more time (when she was
in the Senate) working on a constitutional amendment to repeal the electoral
college, and spent less time giving highly-paid speeches to Wall Street, maybe the person who gets the most votes would become the president.

And let's clarify once and forever that Hillary Clinton did NOT win 3 million
votes more than Trump: it is Trump who lost 3 million votes more than Clinton.
Many of us shut our noses and voted for Hillary Clinton because a) we were
terrified at the prospect of a Russian operative in the White House;
and b) it is about time that the USA has a female president.
She deserves little credit for either.
Only 54% of the eligible voters went to vote, and of these she got about 52%,
which means about 26% of eligible voters voted for her: hardly a plebiscite.

Stop whining and start looking in the mirror. You were an uninspiring candidate,disliked by the majority of the voters, and you deserved to lose.
You would have lost by millions of votes if the Republican Party weren't
such a joke that even a crook, liar, traitor and (generally speaking) scumbag
can win its nomination.

Hillary Clinton should realize that there was an easy way to keep "Vladimir" Trump out of the White House, as i wrote back then: step aside. Just about anybody else could have easily beaten Trump.

(may 2017)
Where we stand with the Trump-Russia investigation.
This timeline got so long that i moved it here.

(april 2017)
"Vladimir" Trump bombs Syria.
All these discussions are useless until Vladimir Trump releases his tax returns,
but, for what it's worth...

It doesn't change anything: Assad and Russia are still winning, and
24 hours later Assad's planes left from the exact same base to bomb the
exact same city (See this article or any other article).

This sudden and isolated bombing raid is the typical distraction created by a president who is haunted by a scandal: bomb somebody and the media will stop talking about your scandal (e.g. Clinton bombed Serbia at the peak of the Lewinski scandal).

Trump now has a lot less power than he thought he would have: the Republican party's establishment is getting what it wants, in particular the hawks like John McCain (who are basically telling Trump "you do what i tell you to do or i go on with the Russia inquest") (and, like me, they have very little doubt of what the Russian inquest will unearth).

By continuously surprising the public and flip-flopping on just about every issue, Trump is continuing the strategy that he used during the presidential campaign: the nation cannot focus on one discussion because the following day he has candidly contradicted himself and started another discussion.

Assad was obviously very confident that the USA would not strike. I wonder why he felt so confident that the USA would not object to his use of chemical weapons (weapons that he was not even supposed to have after the deal brokered by Russia but whose use he didn't even try to hide).

Putin has not really lost much from this bombing. Strategically speaking, the Syrian civil war also and perhaps mainly serves Putin's interests in Europe, not only in the Middle East: Putin has weaponized the millions of Syrian refugees, all of them temporarily hosted in allies of the USA. The bigger the conflict in Syria, the more refugees who destabilize US allies.

Trump, who easily escoriates everybody, from journalists to judges, not to
mention his own political rivals, has never stated plainly that Putin is a bad man, let alone a killer; not even in this case. Trump accused Assad, but not Putin, of committing an atrocity, as if Putin had nothing to do with the fact that Assad keeps bombing his own people using Russian planes and Russian rockets.

(Obama is indeed co-responsible for the Syrian genocide, but that's another story altogether).
Several people testified that the Trumps openly discussed receiving money from Russia. In 2014 Trump's son Eric said to James Dodson: "We don't rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia." In 2008 Trump's other son, Donald Jr, speaking at a real estate conference, said: "We are looking all over the place, primarily Russia."
Conclusion: Trump has surrounded himself with an amazing cast of pro-Russia characters: Steve Bannon, Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, Paul Manafort, Michael Flynn, Rex Tillerson. And some of these people have been amazingly close to money-laundering schemes originating from Russia.
If Trump just released his tax returns, we would know the truth without any need for all these speculations. But of course there's a reason if he refuses to do so.
See also my lengthy investigation: What's in "Vladimir" Trump's tax returns?

(march 2017)
What's in "Vladimir" Trump's tax returns?.
This timeline got so long that i moved it here.

(march 2017)
Vladimir Trump, Russia's stooge
Trump has become the most powerful propagandist for Russia in the West.
The young Putin's goal as a KGB agent was to delegitimize and discredit the USA,
and that has been his agenda since seizing power in Russia.
During his campaign Trump described NATO as "obsolete" (precisely what Russia
wants) and attacked the European Union (just like Russia did) and hailed
Britain's exit from the European Union (just like Russia did).
Trump initially denied any Russian connection but has slowly been forced
to admit each and every one.
Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort worked for a pro-Russian group in Ukraine that paid millions of dollars to Washington lobbyists in 2012.
Trump chose as national security adviser Michael Flynn, who was invited to dinner by Putin in person, was paid by Russian propaganda television and had meetings with the Russian ambassador during the Republican convention.
Trump chose as commerce secretary Wilbur Ross, whose ties with three Russian oligarchs involved in money laundering are beyond dispute.
Now nobody doubts that Trump's staff had multiple secret contacts with Russia
in 2016 leading up to Russia's hacking attack against the Democratic Party.
There is still one piece of the puzzle that Trump vehemently denies: that
Russia has a video of Trump indulging in sex orgies during a visit to Russia.
You decide: do you believe a man who has consistently lied about everything,
and whose statements about Russian connections have all been proven false,
a man who publicly boasted about having indulged in promiscuous sex?
Incidentally, it is quintessential Putin to have someone taped during a sex
orgy and then use that video for blackmail.
I take bets that the video exists (the man who spoke about the existence of
that video is a former British secret agent with a formidable reputation who
has looked for absolutely zero publicity).
And finally there's the long-standing mystery of Trump's tax returns: we already
know that Trump didn't pay taxes, so why keep those tax returns so closely
guarded? The rational answer is that those tax returns contain information
that is so damning to potentially trigger an impeachment. Russians have always
wondered where Putin launders his billions: is it possible that Trump's tax
returns would help shed light on the mystery of Putin's hidden fortune?
Whatever the reason that Putin supports Trump, it is a fact that Putin achieved
what the USA often tries to do to others: regime change. The USA has failed
to achieve regime change in North Korea, Iran and, last but not least, Russia.
Putin succeeded in causing regime change in the USA.
It is obvious why last November
the Russian parliament gave a standing ovation to the news that Trump had
become the new president of the USA (despite losing by three million votes).
In a Fox News interview with Bill O'Reilly of February 2017, Trump stated that the USA has been as much a "killer" as Russia, therefore de facto justifying
Russian atrocities in Syria and Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
There are dozens of statements like these in his speeches and tweets.
Trump keeps justifying Russia and bashing the USA and the USA's allies.
Trump attacks every institution that the West created to counter Russian
expansionism, notably NATO and the European Union (Putin's most hated
international institutions).
Trump attacked, i.e. delegitimized, all the institutions of the US government (from the CIA to the judges) that "made America great".
Putin will have succeeded whatever happens next. If Trump gets impeached for
widespread corruption or for monumental incompetence, Putin still wins: his
goal was to delegitimize the US democracy and to discredit the USA among its
allies, and Putin succeeded on both counts no matter what happens next.
Almost every comment on foreign policy that Trump makes is simply an echo of
similar comments made by Putin at one point or another. Trump has attacked NATO,
the European Union, NAFTA and the USA itself just like Putin routinely does.
Trump killed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP),
one of the best trade deals ever designed,
that would have dealt a
deadly blow to Russia's aspirations in Asia.
It would have strengthened the position of the USA in the Pacific and isolated
China and Russia.
The result of killing that trade deal is to isolate the USA and
strengthen the position of China and Russia.
Trump has given Russia and especially China an unexpected gift.
Trump's USA has basically withdrawn from the Pacific Ocean and from Europe.
China and Russia can expand at will.
When Trump "renegotiates" NAFTA he will basically severe the USA from Canada
and Mexico, who will then be easily conquered economically by Russia and China.
When Trump told the world that NATO is obsolete, he did little to strengthen
the position of the USA in Europe. Europeans got the message loud and clear:
from now on, you are on your own against Russia's aggressions.
When Trump theatened to slap a 35% tariff on BMW cars, it did little to
make Germany a stronger ally. He did a lot to make Germany less likely to
punish Russia for the invasion of Ukraine and its role in the Syrian
holocaust. Germany is now wary that the USA is not a real friend and will
be left alone to face Russia's military might.
Following Trump's dismissal of Ukraine's claims, nobody in Eastern Europe
(the former Soviet satellites) believes that the USA would defend them from
a Russian invasion.
The USA is de facto out of Eastern Europe. The region that fell under US
influence after the collapse of the Soviet Union is now again shifting towards
Russian dominance.
Obama had offered Iran a way to become an ally of the USA in the Middle East.
Trump has promised to reverse that policy. Guess who benefits: Russia will
be able to strengthen its ties to Iran. The Russia-Iran axis will dominate
the Middle East as Trump isolates the USA in the region.
Russia shares a border with Iran
and sells Iran high-tech weapons. Iran is de facto the foot soldier of
Russia in Syria. They both protect the Assad regime against the pro-democracy
rebels (that also used to be pro-USA before Trump insulted Muslims and banned
Syrian freedom-fighters from the USA).
Trump's ban on Muslims further isolates the USA in the Middle East. (I suspect that Saudi Arabia and Turkey were spared from the ban because they have been the main supporters of ISIS and Trump needs a terrorist attack in the USA to consolidate his power. See Is Trump preparing a terrorist attack on the USA?).
Some of these actions could be reversed by Trump's successor (assuming that
Trump doesn't find a way to stay in power until he dies), but some of
the consequences are irreversible: nobody in the world will trust the USA
the same way it did before, and nobody will think of the USA as the most
stable country in the world. Russia and China are clearly more stable
and more reliable.
24 hours after the phone conversation between Putin and Trump, fighting resumed
in Eastern Ukraine. A few days later, one of the most famous Russian dissidents,
was hospitalized with symptoms of acute poisoning. A few days later Alexei Navalny, the only politician willing to run against Putin in the presidential elections, was found guilty of drummed-up charges and banned from running in the elections.
Within one month of Trump's inauguration, Russia sent a warplane to spy on a US carrier, deployed a missile that violates pact, restarted violence in Ukraine
Putin's strategy is to weaken the USA worldwide through Trump and to strengthen
Russia's ties with countries that were beginning to fall into the orbit of the
USA, such as Iran and China.
Trump will be remembered for many generations as the man who caused the
decline of the USA as a world power.

(february 2017)
Trump's omissions tell it all
Trump talks and tweets a lot, and every day the media have to rush to cover
a new idiotic statement even before they finish debating the previous one,
but pay attention to what Trump does NOT say and you can get a glimpse
of the real Trump.
Trump banned citizens from seven countries. That list did NOT include
Saudi Arabia (the country that gave the world most of the Islamic terrorists,
the country that originally supported Al Qaeda, the Taliban and ISIS)
and did NOT include Russia (the only major country that supports the Assad
regime in Syria, a regime that has gased and hanged thousands of its own people).
Then Trump issued a list of some 70 terrorist attacks that in his opinion
have been under-reported by the press. That's telling. Those terrorist
attacks have been widely reported by the press, so Trump and his staff
are basically admitting that they don't read the press. They are so ignorant
that they think the Paris and Istanbul attacks have been under-reported.
Unfortunately, the irony will be lost on many of Trump supporters because
such supporters do exactly the same: they are as ignorant as Trump of world
affairs, so it might indeed come as surprising to them to hear of these
attacks that were widely covered all over the world when they happened.
But the point is not Trump's well-known ignorance. The point is that those
70+ terrorist attacks listed by Trump omit two of the worst ones:
Dylann Roof's attack on an African-American church that killed nine people
in Charleston
(one of the worst terrorist attacks on US soil since 2001) and
Alexandre Bissonnette's attack on a Muslim mosque that killed six people in
Quebec City (the single worst terrorist attack in Canada in recent memory).
Why did Trump omit these two terrorist attacks from his list?
Because they were perpetrated by two white Christians who watch Fox News and
share Trump's radical right-wing views.
The omissions tell you a lot about Trump's idea of terrorism: killing
African-Americans and Muslims is not terrorism for Trump.
Just like the other omissions tell you a lot about Trump's real life:
Trump omitted Putin's Russia from the list of terrorist countries
because Putin is Trump's boss and Trump omitted Saudi Arabia because Trump owns
eight companies in Saudi Arabia.
A few days later came another interesting omission.
Russia's main opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, was found guilty of embezzlement and barred from running in the presidential election against Putin.
Trump did not condemn it, and, in fact, did not mention it at all. Nor did
Fox News. Nor did any of Trump's associates and cheerleaders.
This sounds eerily reminiscent of Trump's demand that his main opponent, Hillary Clinton, be jailed. I can already predict what will happen to Trump's opponent
at the next elections.
Click here for the dossier on the allegations of Russia-Trump collusion.

(february 2017)
Is Trump preparing a terrorist attack on the USA?
Ominous signals are coming from the White House, currently occupied by
a crook, liar, racist, sexist and borderline sociopath who lost the election
by three million votes and got help from Russia to become president.
His tax returns presumably show the extent of his connections with Russia
and Saudi Arabia, the two biggest sponsors of terrorism in the world.
It is a fact that Trump has repeatedly praised Russia's president
Vladimir Putin, who is responsible for the crises in Ukraine, Syria and in
his own Chechnya, and who many experts consider the USA's number one enemy
in the world.
It is also a fact that Trump tried to ban citizens of seven Muslim countries
from entering the USA, but those seven countries have never killed a single
US citizen on US soil, unlike Saudi Arabia, the country from which Osama bin
Laden came from, the country that was the first financial supporter of
all the terrorist organizations that you can name: Al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS, etc.
When a judge correctly determined that such a travel ban was unconstitutional,
Trump quickly tweeted that the judge is now responsible if "something happens".
Nobody is surprised that Trump tried to violate the law (over his life he has
been sued hundreds of times and mostly settled out of court),
and it is not surprising that Trump would attack a judge (he has
attacked all the institutions that curb presidential power, whether the press
or the judicial or his own party).
But this sounds a bit too much like Putin's strategy.
Putin was raised by the KGB, the sinister agency of the Soviet Union.
He worked as a secret agent and learned how to
assassinate people and destabilize foreign countries. He became the most
powerful man in Russia in 1999. The way he became the de-facto dictator is
important: he is widely suspected of staging a terrorist attack against his own people.
In 1999 two journalists, independently, published articles in which they predicted terrorist attacks in Russia, based on government leaks:
Giulietto Chiesa and Aleksandr Zhilin.
In september of 1999 that's precisely what happened:
Chechen separatists were blamed for terrorist attacks on Buynaksk, Moscow and Volgodonsk that killed nearly 300 people, but rumors immediately circulated
that the attacks were work of the FSB (the renamed KGB),
especially after similar unexploded bombs were found at Ryazan
and they were traced back to the Russian military.
Putin used those terrorist attacks to justify a brutal military campaign
in Chechnya, a Muslim region of Russia, that ended up killing tens of thousands of Muslims.
More importantly, he presented himself as the strong man who could save Russia
from chaos
and the Russian public saw him as a savior. Nobody dared oppose him as he
increased his power way beyond what was allowed by the constitution.
Bottom line: the evidence is that Putin staged the terrorist attacks to
justify changes in the laws that allowed him to rule indefinitely with
unlimited powers.
After that Putin correctly saw that the courts of law and the investigative
reporters were the only threat to his power and proceeded to eliminate them
one way or another. Several were physically eliminated, others had to flee
to the Western countries, others simply retired from public view.
Trump seems to be setting up the USA for a similar narrative.
He has already invented non-existing terrorist attacks and massacres both
in Europe and in the USA. And he is now blaming the media and the judges
for making the USA vulnerable.
To me this sounds like a carefully-architected plan to prepare the public
for a terrorist attack and then blame such terrorist attack on the media
and the judges, which he perceives
as his sworn enemies just like Putin did at the beginning of his dictatorship.
We just don't have time to analyze and comment everything that Trump and
his associates say, right? It's more than a full-time job. Every day they
come out with some outrageously false statement. Every day there is something
that, under Obama or any other president, would become a "scandal" haunting
the president for years. But Trump does one every day and it is physically
impossible to keep up with him. Right?
Well, the avalanche of provocative statements issued by Trump and his associates serves
a very rational purpose: to make sure that the media, the institutions and,
more importantly, the public cannot focus on Trump's treacherous
plan. This is a man committed to cause damage to the USA.
The people who think that Trump is an idiot are naive: Trump's strategy is very
clever and it is exactly what Putin, a very clever leader, did in Russia.
(In mid-february Trump held a Mussolini-style rally in which he claimed, and
i'm quoting verbatim: "You look at what's happening last night in Sweden. Sweden, who would believe this. Sweden." That's yet another non-existent terrorist
attack invented by Trump and his cohorts. There has never been an Islamic terrorist attack in Sweden, certainly not "yesterday" but not even before yesterday.
This is no stupid man. He knows exactly what he is doing: he is preparing the
US public for a major terrorist attack that he will then blame on what he calls "radical Islam", when in fact that terrorist attack will have been masterminded by a radical right-wing Russian operative).
The suspicion that Trump is a traitor who obeys orders from Russia to
undermine the USA is stronger than ever. Now we can also suspect that he is
planning a terrorist attack in the USA, which he will then blame on his
"enemies" and will use as an excuse to replace honest judges and journalists
with "friendly" judges and journalists.

(january 2017)
"Vladimir" Trump welcomes sponsors of terrorism and bans fighters of terrorism.
Trump continues to weaken the defenses of the USA. Defying a centuries-old tradition of
welcoming persecuted people, this unelected impostor signed an
executive orders to block the immigration of people from Iraq, Syria, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. These are the people who fight terrorism.
Iranians are Shiite: they are enemies of Al Qaeda and ISIS. Iran was the first
country to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan and ISIS in Iraq and Syria.
Iraqis, Syrians and Libyans are fighting ISIS for real, while Trump (a coward
and traitor who dodged the draft in the USA) sits comfortably in his chair.
Sudan and Somalia were probably added to the list just because their names
sound exotic: there are only a handful of immigrants from those countries
every year.
On the other hand, Trump welcomes people from the countries that sponsor
terrorism: Saudi Arabia (that provided most of the 2001 terrorists who killed
3,000 US citizens), Pakistan (the homeland of the Taliban, the country where
Osama bin Laden went hiding), Afghanistan (half of which is ruled by the
Taliban and by Al Qaeda),
Turkey (that was the main sponsor of ISIS), Israel (that
has done much to create tension in the Middle East), and of course
his favorite, Russia, without which there would be no ISIS because Syria's
dictator would have fallen long ago.
None of the Muslim countries in which Trump has invested (hotels, golf courses,
etc) is included in this list.
Trump of course didn't ban the National Rifle Association: all the terrorists
since 2001 were US citizens who bought their weapons legally thanks to the
actions of the NRA.
(The good news is that Trump did not ban Palestinians, who used to be considered terrorists no matter what Israel does to them, but i'm afraid that this happened out of Trump's ignorance, not out of his knowledge of the facts).
Make no mistake: the same way that this madman can sign an executive order
to help terrorists he can press a button and start a nuclear holocaust.
The USA is now ruled by a man who works for the enemy.

(january 2017)
"Vladimir" Trump's unstoppable march towards the Russification of the USA.
It is telling that
there are calls for "unity" from every quarter, including Barack Obama,
but we are supposed to unite only in one direction: meekly accepting Vladimir Trump as the legitimate president of the USA.
This is a sign that we live in an increasingly totalitarian age.
There are actually an infinite number of ways in which a nation can "unite",
and uniting behind a vulgar crook, charlatan, traitor and impostor doesn't
seem to me the best way. Uniting against him, for example, is another one.
But you are supposed to think
and act according to predefined rules and regulations, just like when a
conference website asks you "are you excited about the future" and the
only option is "yes" (i just saw this when trying to register)

or when facebook gives you a Like button but not a Dislike button.
In my opinion there is a better way to unite: the nation should unite
in restoring decency and integrity to the presidency, and in appeasing the
terror generated around the free democratic world by the 2016 US election.
Some will say that we should wait and see what he does. But he's the one
who (without a mandate from the people) pledged to take action from the first day in office. If he takes action on his first day in office, why shouldn't we?
What is more important: to
repeal Obamacare (which he actually didn't do) or to keep nuclear weapons
off the hands of a sociopath?
A headline that would summarize what is in the minds of billions of people around the world should read: "Vladimir Trump has officially been inaugurated as the illegitimate president of the Disunited States of America, a province of Russia."
Trump has undermined first NATO (calling it "obsolete" more than once) and then
the CIA (first ridiculing it for its gaffe on the weapons of mass destruction in
Iraq and then even comparing it with Nazi Germany).
How can millions of US citizen be so naive?
Who benefits if the CIA and NATO are demolished by Trump?
Which country benefits? It doesn't take a PhD in political science: Russia.
Which is the only country that Trump has not criticized? Russia.
The suspicion that Vladimir Trump is a Russian agent, paid (see his tax returns) and instructed by Moscow to destroy the power of the USA is more justified than ever.
It is suicidal that the US Congress is allowing a suspected Russian agent to
take control of the US nuclear arsenal and of all strategic military assets of the USA around the world. We can only hope that generals and admirals are preparing to hide information from Vladimir Trump and disobey his orders.
We can only hope that the CIA and the NSA have a top-secret plan to curb the
power of this sociopath.
Alas, there is a chance that, instead, scores of CIA agents will resign and
scores of generals will retire, which was precisely Putin's goal.
As expected, Trump is appointing to his cabinet a grotesque group of:
Wall Street mafia (Steven Mnuchin, formerly of Goldman Sachs;
Rex Tillerson, the CEO of oil multinational Exxon, famous for the 1989 oil
spill in Alaska, the biggest of all times, and for a 2015 scandal about hiding
that it knew all along about its impact on climate change;
billionaire Wilbur Ross, better known as the "king of bankruptcy";
fast-food billionaire Andrew Puzder);
borderline war criminals (Mike Pompeo, who defended the CIA's torture program, as director of the CIA?);
certified racists (Stephen Bannon, Jeff Sessions, Michael Flynn);
friends of Putin (abovesaid Michael Flynn as National Security Adviser? Wilbur Ross as secretary of commerce?),
family members (Jared Kushner),
and plain idiots (Rick Perry, who wanted to eliminate
the Department of Energy, to lead the Department of Energy?
Sonny Perdue, who prays in public for rain when there is a drought, as Secretary of Agriculture?
Ben Carson, a surgeon with no experience, to lead Housing Development?
Scott Pruitt, who denies that climate is changing, to lead the
Environmental Protection Agency that is supposed to protect us from climate change?)
This is a government designed to destroy the USA.
Using a tactic widely practiced by his master Putin, Trump has lambasted all the institutions that stand between him and absolute rule: political rivals (all the Republicans who opposed him or just criticized him plus Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren), journalists (from Megyn Kelly to CNN), judges (any judge who rules against his many frauds), generals (John Allen), secret services (the CIA's director), civil-rights activists (John Lewis), polls ("phony" and "rigged") and even comedians (Saturday Night Live).
He, the master of fake news, is accusing of fake news any media that dare publish the truth about him (100% Putin-ism). The call for censorship is even too clear. (And it is already effective: on January 17 all European media were reporting a lawsuit against Trump filed by a young woman, but none of the main US media mentioned it).
It is not a coincidence that Aleppo fell to the Russians at about the same time
that Russia got Trump elected president of the USA.
Russia has interfered in US politics the same way that it interfered in Syria,
trying to create the same kind of civil war.
Putin and the radical right-wing media are carrying out an attack to the core of the US democracy.
Russia has learned that it can destabilize the West without any need for
massive military operations: just surgical strikes in Ukraine and Syria that
send shock waves throughout Europe, and fake news that send shock waves
among the low-tech low-education blue-collar masses of the USA.
Putin understood that now in the USA everything happens in cyberspace: those who control cyberspace control society.
Putin is man of the year 2016.
Putin ended 2016 winning the war in Syria against the West and installing
a puppet dictator in the USA.
Russia has the largest nuclear arsenal in the world and now indirectly also controls the nuclear arsenal of the USA.
Putin convinced the world that the USA is not to be trusted in the long term,
convinced NATO members that NATO will not defend them (the way Russia would),
and convinced Europeans that the European Union is not protecting their
citizens the way Russia protects Russians.
When, upon hearing news of Trump's victory, the Russian parliament
gave Putin a standing ovation, it was totally deserved.
Do not underestimate the consequences of fake news.
The trouble in the Middle East started precisely with fake news: that the
Holocaust never happened, that Zionists stole land from the Palestinians (they actually bought it legally under the laws of the Ottoman Empire), that the USA
invaded Iraq to steal the oil, that Muslims had nothing to do with the 2001 terrorist attacks, etc. When i was in the Middle East in 2005, people routinely
told me that thousands of Muslims had been killed in the streets of New York
in retaliation for the 2001 attacks: in reality not a single Muslim was killed,
but fake news like this one were fueling the "insurrection" against the USA.
News media like Al Jazeera became masters of fake news, and sowed the seeds
of today's hatred between Sunnis and Shiites.
The result of all these fake news was the civil wars in Iraq and Syria.
Fox News' campaign of lies and exaggerations has had the same effect, and
the fake news spread in the USA by Russia and other radical right-wing
supporters of Donald Trump could end up having the same effect:
fueling a civil war between "blue" and "red" states.
Blue states are 100% justified in being fed up that the red states (generally
poorer and backwards, and therefore more gullible when it comes to fake news) end up determining who becomes the most powerful person
in the world, a power bestowed on this person largely by the science and
technology of the blue states.
And do not ignore the problems that created this bigger problem: the USA has
weird electoral rules that are often undemocratic
(see Do not get over it).
Worse: it does not have a law
to limit the power of the president to start a nuclear war: the president can launch a nuclear attack without asking for anybody's permission.
After spending decades telling the world that no rogue state and no crazy
politician should be allowed to get near a nuclear bomb, the USA has just given
control of 3,000 nuclear bombs to a sociopath.
Congress urgently needs to reform the constitution to make sure that 1. the will
of the people is implemented, and 2. keep the president from unilaterally
launching a nuclear strike.
Trump has told Merkel that Germany made a "catastrophic" mistake in accepting one million refugees. Who made the bigger mistake: Germany that accepted one million honest law-abiding refugees, or the USA that accepted a crook and sociopath supported by Russia as its president? Which country is becoming "great again": Germany that inspires billions of people around the world or the USA that has to be ashamed of the most ignorant and dishonest leader in the world and will be
completely isolated in the free democratic world?
"Vladimir" Trump is determined to turn "America the great" into a poor and defenseless region of Russia, a Dagestan or Khakassia, instead of taking inspiration from Germany.
As a friend said, this time God did not bless America (Putin did).
Accused of not paying taxes during a debate with Hillary Clinton, Trump quipped: "That makes me smart." Clinton's rebuttal "What does that make the rest of us?"
is still a good question for Trump voters to ask themselves.

"Lock Him Up": Trumpism and the UNITED states .
Ironically, Trump (who is obviously not a real Republican but just a selfish amoral crook) has a real chance to unite the country. Read below and you'll see that on many issues he is more of a socialist than Barack Obama (and this man who divorced twice and boasted about his extramarital sex is obviously way less religious than Hillary Clinton or the Obamas).

Trumpism and the Republican Party

The Republican Party would have never approved a socialist agenda of infrastructure spending and anti-corporate legislation if a Democratic president had proposed it. It might accept it now that it comes from a radical right-wing president (just like it took a Republican right-wing president to pull out of Vietnam and make peace with China).

Trump has insulted only two Democrats (Hillary "Lock her up" Clinton and Elizabeth "Pocahontas" Warren) but he has insulted scores of powerful Republicans in the Senate, from Paul Ryan to John McCain. You can bet that these powerful brahmins are just waiting for a chance to get back at him.

Trump is a communist in disguise. He offered a firm advantages in order for that firm to keep 1,000 jobs in the USA. What about all the competitors of this firm, who are suddenly at a disadvantage? He told Apple to bring back jobs from overseas (who will buy Apple products made in the USA that cost twice the products made by competitors overseas?) Will Trump subsidize Apple too? What about Apple's competitors in the USA? Who else will get Trump's subsidies to keep jobs in the USA? The Republican Party strongly opposed Obama's actions in 2009 to salvage Detroit's car manufacturers on the ground that government intervention stifles competition and distorts markets, which is absolutely correct. Republicans would have strongly opposed any attempt by a Democratic president to reward a company over others. Trump is telling US companies what to do like the old Soviet regime used to: government picks winners and losers. Trump is more aligned with the left-wing of the Democratic Party than with his own party.

The USA is witnessing a realignment of ideologies. The "left" used to be defender of the proletariat (the blue-collar class), but it has now become the defender of the high-tech white-collar jobs. The next step for Trumpism will be to convince the poorest ethnic minorities that the Democratic Party is no longer their defender. This is clearly possible because the poorest minorities are still the poorest. For example, Democrats never found the gut to tell black communities that the problem is not police brutality but the brutality of too many young black males. If you don't count young black males, the crime rate in the USA is not too much higher than in Europe, but this is a statistic that you can only whisper to your closest friends because it is politically incorrect. If Donald Trump becomes the first president to say it loud and clear, he may actually win over that minority.

Trumpism and the Democratic Party

The problem that Trump has with the Democratic Party is very simple: Hillary Clinton won the election by almost three million votes, Trump lost it. Anything that Trump does claiming to have a mandate from the people is simply illegitimate: he does NOT have a mandate from the people.

It doesn't help that Trump behaves like a sore loser. Trump: you lost the popular vote, admit it and get over it.

Trumpism and Science

Scientists and inventors of the USA (especially in the so-called "blue state" that voted overwhelmingly against Trump) have to think long and hard whether they want to continue research that will help their government remain the world's superpower. All the scientists who worked in and for Germany in the 1930s lived to regret that they directly helped a sociopath like Hitler harm millions of people. Let us not repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

If you believe that Trump could engineer the next big terrorist attack, support torture, cause genocides, crack down on dissent, lead to a climate disaster, silence the media and increase the gap between rich and poor, why would you "work" for him? why would you want to help him in any form or fashion to achieve such heinous goals?

This is particularly true of Silicon Valley which, alone, provides the US government with most of the technology to fight wars, to spy on citizens and, potentially, to control all information in the country. Silicon Valley, Boston, Seattle, New York, New Jersey, Maryland and Chicago (that together constitute the vast majority of the high-tech world) need to study the words "civil disobedience". And, of course, "secession".

Silicon Valley is being agnostic about Trump because it smells opportunities: military investment would bring back the age of the DARPA-funded military investments that triggered the first boom of Silicon Valley; and deregulation is always welcome by Silicon Valley's rampant capitalism.

But forcing Apple and the other high-tech firms to bring jobs back to the USA is a great idea if you want to boost the business of Apple's competitors around the world and destroy the high-tech industry of the USA. Apple, Google, Facebook and so forth desperately need one thing: Chinese and Indian immigrants. The last thing they need is the uneducated blue-collar dropouts of the Midwest and the rednecks of the South who voted for Trump's "Let's make America great again". Silicon Valley "is" great, as great as any center of technology has ever been.

Trumpism and False News

Trump won the Midwestern states thanks to a campaign of scientific lying and inventing false news. This is not going away any time soon. It works. If you keep repeating a lie, eventually people think it's true. As his role model Adolf Hitler wrote: "The size of the lie is a definite factor in causing it to be believed" (Mein Kampf). The similaries between Trump's USA and 1933 Germany are obvious: Hitler was elected with a minority of votes, after promising to make Germany great again.

I have very intellectual friends who rarely read more than 140 characters. If intellectuals rarely read more than 140 characters, imagine the low-income individuals with no college degrees.

Trump's obsession with the "Iran deal" is a bit comic. Iran poses no threat to the USA, and in fact it has been fighting the same enemies (Al Qaeda, Taliban, ISIS, etc). I doubt that Trump knows where North Korea is, but that country constitutes the main immediate danger for the USA. North Korea does have a nuclear weapon (unlike Trump's obsession Iran) and will soon have missiles capable of striking the USA (unlike Iran). Very soon it will be capable of striking Hawaii, if not Alaska, if not California. The West Coast is disposable for Trump because it is mostly inhabited by liberals, but it may be bad publicity when North Korea wipes out Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Boeing and Intel. North Korea has benefited from the hesitation of all the previous US presidents. Far from being an irrational regime, its regime is very rational: once it has nuclear weapons, it will be able to extort great deals from the powers and revitalize its economy. Then all the other countries of the world will learn the lesson: look at what happened to Iraq and Libya that did NOT have nuclear bombs, and look what happens to North Korea that has it.

Trumpism and China

China obviously wins if the USA withdraws from the transpacific trade agreement (the TPP). Trade deals are not meant only for economic growth: they are also strategic long-term alliances. If the USA withdraws from the TPP, the small countries of Asia will be pushed into China's orbit without any need for China to use force. Killing the TPP is the biggest possible gift to China. (The TPP also happens to be the best trade deal ever engineered by the USA, an excellent trade deal)

China has now close relatioships with Cambodia, which is basically its Trojan horse into ASEAN (ASEAN cannot approve any anti-Chinese policy because of Cambodia's veto) and has made peace with the Philippines. 2016 was the first year in a decade that the USA and Cambodia did not stage joint military exercises. It was also the first year that Cambodia and China staged military exercises.

President Xi was a start at the 2016 Davos meeting of the world's most powerful people. He delivered a speech in which he defended globalization and the environment, two items in which the USA used to be leading. Now the USA is following (maybe not even following).

Trump's USA is a model of instability. Xi's China is a model of stability. Which country would choose the USA as a friend over China?

Nobody (not even in China itself) truly understands why the USA tolerates that Google, Facebook, Twitter, and even scaruffi.com are banned in China while no Chinese product is banned in the USA. "Fair" trade with China means that all US products get a chance in China. This will be the first test of how serious Trump was about "fair trade".

Trump's protectionist policies could lead to a much stronger dollar, which means much cheaper imports, in which case East Asia and Latin America would not need any trade agreement (neither TPP nor NAFTA) to easily "steal" jobs from the USA.

Trump accuses China of manipulating its currency but China has been spending billions of dollars to prop its currency up, not down. First of all, China doesn't want its billionaires to move all their money out of the country, which they would do if the Chinese currency declined. Secondly, China's ambition is to make its currency and international currency as good as the dollar, which cannot happen is the Chinese currency is weak.

A surge in US military presence may actually tame the hawks in China. Hawks prevail when the military gap with the USA seems to close and it makes sense to invest in closing it completely. Doves prevail when the gap is so big that it makes no sense to even try to compete militarily: better invest in lifting 700 million people out of poverty. His increased military spending is probably a really bad idea because we just don't have the money, BUT it may actually have a positive effect on Asia. In every major nation there is a constant fight between hawks and doves. The doves win whenever it is impossible to catch up with the regional power. The hawks win whenever the gap with the regional power shrinks and it looks like it is possible to catch up. Make the gap huge and they all focus on domestic issues (the doves win). Let the gap shrink and they all focus on building up the military. So... that's China. Right now the hawks are winning because the gap with the USA has shrunk and the hawks have a convincing argument that China can catch up militarily. If the USA builds an extra 100 warships and deploys them in front of China, it will help the doves: impossible to catch up with the USA, let's just focus on our economy. There's a problem though: the USA, not China, is broke.

Ironically, Trump wants to bring back the manufacturing jobs to the USA at the same time that China doesn't want them anymore. China wants Silicon Valeys, not Detroits. Trump wants the USA to look more like China when China wants to look more like the USA.

Trump wants to spend China into oblivion like Reagan spent the Soviet Union into oblivion: first of all, the Polish Pope and the Afghan mujaheddins may have done more to destroy the Soviet Union than Reagan's military spending; but, secondly, why do we think that the USA could spend China into oblivion rather than China spending the USA into oblivion? Who has the cash these days? The USA needs to borrow money from China in order to build its warships and warplanes.

In 2016 these are the countries with the highest-achieving primary and secondary pupils: 1. Singapore; 2. South Korea; 3. Taiwan; 4. Hong Kong; 5. Japan (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study, TIMSS 2016). There is no China, but notice that 1, 3 and 4 are Chinese regions, located outside main China but still inhabited by Chinese. These three regions have left the USA behind. It is just a matter of time before declining US education is passed by rising Chinese education. Trump has proven to millions of US families that it is not worth studying.

China, the only ally that North Korea has, is unlikely to help the USA on North Korea. The reason is simple: China has only one ally, that one. Another reason is that, all considered, having a nuclear North Korea is not such a bad thing for China, which is surrounded by dozens of US military bases. Imagine if Chinese troops and ships were deployed in Canada and Mexico. That's precisely how the Chinese feel: there are US troops and ships in Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Mongolia, Central Asia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Thailand, Singapore, and the USA has a nuclear treaty with India. What has China got to retaliate?

Trumpism and the Middle East

If Trump repeals the nuclear deal with Iran and reinstates sanctionsagainst Iran, the Middle East will officially divide into a Sunni-Jewish alliance, stretching from Egypt to Saudi Arabia via Israel, and a Shiite alliance, stretching from Lebanon to Yemen via Syria, Iraq and Iran.

Islamic terrorism in the USA is largely an invention of the radical right-wing media and their political emanations. The fact is that there has been no real terrorist attack in the USA since 2001. The mass killings credited to ISIS are simply part of the pattern of mass killings in a country that has more guns than driver licenses. Mathematically speaking, the chances that you will be killed by a terrorist is much lower than the chance of being killed by your neighbor or a family member.

ISIS is not an enemy of the USA more than the intellectuals of France are. Nor is Iran. Both have wildly different goals in life. ISIS is certainly an enemy of the Shiites (it started out by fighting against Syria and Iraq, both supported by Shiite Iran), and the USA is currently allied with Jews (Israel) and Sunnis (Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, etc), who are on the same side of ISIS (like it or not); so the USA is not necessarily an enemy of ISIS. If the USA is indeed fighting ISIS and Al Qaeda, then Iran is on the same side: Iran was fighting both the Taliban and Al Qaeda way before the USA did, and Iran was the first country to fight ISIS when it started expanding in Syria. The USA never truly made up its mind about whom it is fighting and with whom.

The Middle East is a major crisis for Europe, not for the USA. It is Europe that has to deal with millions of refugees, and it is Europe that imports huge amounts of oil from the Middle East. The reason that keeps dragging the USA into the Middle East is called Israel. Too many US presidents took orders from the Israeli prime minister, and Trump has promised to do the same. (See The USA is a banana republic)

The Middle East is a major opportunity for Russia, that had no allies before the Syrian civil war broke out, not for the USA, that will retain its allies whichever way the Syrian civil war ends. Trump will help his boss Putin if the USA fights the same enemy that Russia has there.

Iran, on the other hand, is a major opportunity for the USA, that could turn an enemy into the ally that it once was. Alas, the prime minister of Israel (that de facto controls the US Congress) is opposed to Iran and Trump's boss in Moscow does not want a US-Iran alliance.

Trump is a dividing figure in Europe just like he is in the USA, but, like in the USA, sentiments are ambivalent about the crook in chief.

A large segment of European public opinion is appalled that all European leaders keep excusing Islam. When Trump openly blames Islam for the endless terrorist attacks that are destroying the Western way of life, it is not shudders of fear that spread through Europe but sighs of hope that someone will finally use common sense.

Climate change is a big issue in Europe. Trump does not believe that it is a big deal, most Europeans do... and blame the USA for it.

From the European standpoint, the big mess in Iraq, Syria and Lybia was caused by US incompetence and ignorance. Trump has criticized the George W Bush wars, the first Republican to do so. That's a promising sign for Europeans; but Trump also embodies more than anyone else US incompetence and ignorance; and that is definitely not a promising sign for Europeans who had to live through eight years of George W Bush incompetence and ignorance.

Trump is the first US president ever who does not support European unification (he loudly praised the British for leaving the EU). Suddenly, Europeans realize that they may have to take care of themselves. Smaller countries on the eastern front suddenly realize that the USA (run by a Putin stooge like trump) would not protect them from a Russian invasion: who will? France? Germany? Britain? Not very likely in these days and times.

Coincidence or not, Western Europe was at war for more than 1600 years before the USA occupied it in 1945. The longest period of peace in Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire coincides with the Pax Americana that protected Western Europe against Nazism first and Communism later. The Pax Americana was already weakened by Obama, who wasn't willing to intervene in Ukraine, and may be terminated under Trump. Then we will find out if the Europeans have truly become peaceful.

The only Western European politicians who were ecstatic about Trump's victory were the radical right-wing leaders Geert Wilders (Netherlands), Frauke Petry (Germany) and Marine Le Pen (France). They share Trump's racist, nationalist and anti-liberal views. Poland and Hungary are already ruled by radical right-wing populist autocrats. Italy's equivalent of these nationalist parties is the party run by a comedian who goes by the name Grillo (Cricket), a movement that was preceded by the racist Northern League in a government coalition with the populist right-wing tycoon Silvio Berlusconi (does it ring a bell? Tea Party + Donald Trump?). These are all "Euro-skeptics", hostile to the great international organizations such as European Union, euro and NATO. All of them want to make their country "great again".

Many in Britain viewed membership of their country in the European Union as a sort of European occupation, almost as if France had achieved Napoleon's goal or, worse, Germany had achieved Hitler's goal. These British people probably view Trump as a restorer of the traditional order, in which the Anglosaxons stand up against (not join) continental Europe.

Donald Trump and British prime minister Theresa May want to resurrect the kind of relationship that Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher enjoyed in the 1990s. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution mainly relied on a common enemy (the Soviet Union) but also on the "trickle-down" economics that probably is the single most important cause of (ironically) the impoverishment of the rust-belt towns that today vote for Trump and May. Last but not least, the end of the Cold War combined with their passion for free trade, turned the developing world into one giant offsourcing paradise (e.g. China and India), which is precisely the event that crippled the manufacturing base in the USA, i.e. impoverished the people who now vote for Trump.

Ironically, Trump also has a real chance to unite the West, but around very different values than the idealistic values of the last 70 years. For better and for worse, many Europeans are increasingly hungry for someone who says what Trump said about Islam, immigration, the EU, NATO, etc.

Who would have predicted 70 years ago (at the end of World War II) that in 2017 the last hope of Western liberal-democratic ideology would be Germany: Angela Merkel was the only world leader who, when congratulating Trump for his victory, reminded Trump of the value of (quote) "democracy, freedom and respect for the law and the dignity of man, independent of origin, skin color, religion, gender, sexual orientation or political views." Germany may find itself alone again, but this time on the side of defending democracy against the rising tides of fascism in Britain, the USA and the rest of Europe.